Ideas

The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas. — Linus Pauling

This is a loosely organized list of potential Android app ideas, their
intentions and target groups.

The Fruit-Ripeness-Meter

Buying ripe fruit in a supermarkt can be a real hassle for red-green color
blind people. For example choosing a banana that is ready to eat is
difficult, as the difference between an unripe green banana and a ripe
yellow one is sometimes very subtle, making it hard to spot a good banana
with the bare eye.

This app will help red-green color blind people by allowing them to take a
picture of their fruit and getting told whether or not it is ripe.

Peer to Peer Messenger

Popular mobile chatting apps all require backends to deliver messages to
their receivers. This is less than ideal when considering privacy or when
being caught in a place with little or no network coverage.

By using a peer to peer messenger we could send message between devices
without letting anyone else every know about what just happened. While it
might take a little longer for a message to propagate to its destintation,
it could serve as a valuable addition to existing apps.

The Distributed Evolution Game

Nowadays virtually everyone you meet has a powerful smartphone right in
their pocket and we tend to meet a lot of different people over the day.
What if we would build a game that would trigger some sort of interaction
whenever two (new) people meet?

In the Distributed Evolution Game everyone has some sort of personal animal
/ monster / pet is living inside smartphones (Tamagotchi anyone?) which can
evolve over time by exchanging DNA with other people. If done frequently
enough this would lead to a diverse set of creates which all have different
abilities and could then compete with one another in various challenges.

Electronic organ donor card

Organ or tissue transplantation can give ill and disabled people the
chance of a new or better life. The prerequisite is, and always will be,
that people continue to express their willingness to donate organs and/
or tissue after their death. We would therefore ask you to think about
the subject of organ and tissue donation and then reach your own,
personal decision. — Bundeszentrale für gesundheitliche Aufklärung

As you just read, donating organs may save other people’s lifes. Since organ
donation prerequisites you to carry an organ donor card with you, I came up
with the idea to provide an electronic pendant to the classic printed version.

Since most people own a smartphone, which they happen to carry with them almost
all the time, it would be great to have an organ donor app which provides a
lockscreen widget. Using this widget it would be possible to view the organ
donor card even if the smartphone is locked.
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Smartphone Orchestra

This is less on the useful and more on the fun / geeky side: imaging
hooking up multiple smartphones in such a way that they together play a
tune or song. With a lot of phones connected this could result in a setup
similar to a real life orchestra where each phone is responsible for
playing certain notes.

Another possible way to look at this idea is to simulate a surround sound
system using multiple phones. While probably not being a replacement for
a real sound system, it could be a fun party trick with many people
involved.

Android to Android Audio Streaming

Have you ever wanted to share your current audio / music stream that you
are listening with people that are in the same network but couldn’t
because there wasn’t a link to share? Well, why don’t we just forward your audio stream
directly to your friends?

This app allows users to create a distributed speaker system, where one
client controls what music is currently playing and all other phones act
as speakers which can be spread across multiple rooms.

Smartphone Memory - DONE

Want to play memory with your kids or friends but don’t have any suitable
cards with you? No problem! Just put your and your friends’ phones on the
table and open the memory app. Depending on the screensize each phone
will display the backside of a number of cards which you can tap to open.

Personal Time Tracker (NFC)

Keeping an eye on your total time spent on a subject isn’t always easy.
Using NFC tags this job could be made much easier.

Utilizing your mobile as a stamp card you could check-in whenever you start
working on a subject by simply placing it on top of an NFC tag.
As soon as you lift your mobile off the tag, the elapsed time gets measured and stored,
giving you an exact overview on how long you’ve been working on something.

Weather forecast for a trip - DONE

Have you ever wondered how the weather might evolve while you are
planning for a trip? Regular weather forecasts are great, but limited in
a sense that they only provide data for one location, so getting
forecasts for a long trip which might take more than one day is a very
cumbersome and dull task.

This app will show you the weather forecast along a route that you can
choose. In addition all weather details will be based on the estimated
time when you will have reached a particular checkpoint. No more manually
entering multiple locations with different times!

Conveyor belts

Everyone loves conveyor belts (I know you do too) and it’s fun watching
stuff moving through a complicated maze before it reaches its
destination. And it only get’s better when adding the ability to change
parts of the maze and dictate where that stuff is actually going.

This app will do just that, either in the context of an airport where
bags need to be forwarded to the right plane, or in the form of a sushi
restaurant where food should go to the customer who ordered it.

If time permits this game could also be played by combining multiple
screens (think people seeing different parts of the airport or the
restaurant).

Android BoxClub - DONE

An Android game which utilizes built-in sensors to give you the thrill of
a real boxing match!

By utilizing the built-in sensors of a typical Android phone we try to
recreate the movement of a boxer. You will be able to throw punches by
rotating your phone, take cover by tilting it to the back and maybe even
more.

FAU Room Finder

New students often have problems finding the room they have to be in. This app
should give them the possibility to just enter the room they’re searching for and
get navigation information. Just like a satnav in a car!

Swipe Ideas

People have awesome ideas. This app should give them a way to figure out which one
of their ideas is the most awesome. Similar to tinder, you swipe left or right.
The twist is, that you don’t swipe people, you swipe ideas, projects, features, etc.

SigLocate - DONE

It’s lunch time and everybody is up and about in the cafeteria trying to find
that friend you promised to have lunch with today. Of course you could call / text
your friend, but surely there is a better way to do this?

Enter SigLocate! SigLocate has a map of the local cafeteria at the FAU, Germany
where you can simply click to select your sitting location and share the resulting
image via any other app.

Virtual Card Table

So you have gathered a bunch of friends for a fun night of your favourite card
game, prepared beer, snacks and a good dose of music, only to discover that
nobody remembered to bring the most important equipment: cards!

What do you do? Pull out your phone, hock it up to the tablet that’s lying on the
table, open the virtual card table app, select the game you want to play
and off you go!

The app lets you see which cards have been played on one central screen (e.g. tablet),
while keeping your hand cards hidden on your phone.

Bike rescue

If you do your daily commute via bike you might have run into this situation:
almost at work with your head already deep into the challenges for this day
when BAAM you’re front tire blows. Normally this isn’t a problem if you
have the necessary tools with you, but what if you don’t?

In Germany there is the ADAC when your car breaks down, but what about your bike?
What if you could use your smartphone to find fellow bikers near you who
have the tools required to fix up your bike? You could be on your way within
minutes in stead of having to interrupt family and friends in the middle of their day
and hope that somebody will pick you up.

Baby Faces - DONE

Probably every parent will have come across this at some point in the
parenting career: having kids is great, but sometimes also a little scary to
see just how quick they grow up and become adults. If you want to save
some of those early memories from the toddler age, why not take a picture
of your loved little one every week and have that compiled into a video
once your kid reaches a certain age?

Smart door lock

The title says it all: a door (to your house for example) that will
unlock itself once your phone approaches. Could be combined with keeping
track how many people are inside, who they are and how long they have
been there (think time tracking for work). Also a nice chance to play
around with the Eddystone
framework.

Collaborative Photo Taking

We have all seen it: you go on a trip with a couple of friends or with
your colleagues, you see something pretty, everyone takes out their camera
/ smartphone and starts taking pictures. At the end of the day you realize that
you missed one or two great photo spots and start asking around is somebody
could provide the missing photos. If somebody is motivated enough you might
even open up a Dropbox folder where everyone can dump their photos.

While this works it doesn’t feel very smooth and is definitely not
a lot of fun. Sure we can do better than that in 2015 and make taking photos in
a group fun and and enjoyable?

Order Food together with Friends

Whenever I want to order food with friends, we have the same problem: We can only
look at the menu on one mobile device. That slows down the process of ordering a
lot. What if you could just look at the menu on multiple devices, click on what
you want, and one person gathers all the requests automatically and orders them?

Happy Hour Navigator

Image you and and friends are planning a night out in your local town and
are trying to find the bars with the best deals near you. In the good old
days (now!) you’d ask your friends about where the closest happy hour is
and if there is some clever way of combining that with happy hours of
other bars.

That’s of course a lot of manual work and you are bound to miss the best
deals unless you have some very up to date friends. So why isn’t there
any app which helps you navigate the happy hours near you?

Jumping Dinner Orga Service

Organising a so called “Jumping Dinner” can be extremely time intensive as the
matching of tens or potentially hundreds of participants by hand will surely at
some point mess with your sanity ;-). Hence, the idea is to create a service which
automates registration, matching and other, time-intensive tasks which arise
around the organisation of a Jumping Dinner.